Israeli Psychology

How many times have I heard Israelis try to shut down their critics with an argument that preserves for Israelis the right to criticize Israel? The argument is of the following general form: “until you’ve lived in Israel, you can’t criticize it”. Another permutation is that you can’t criticize Israel unless you’ve served (read: been […]

A series of recent discussions in my life (with very well intentioned people) have focused on whether cultural boycott of Israel is perhaps a bit too extreme of a position. Doesn’t it just run the risk of alienating Israelis and making them less likely to make sacrifices for peace and justice? The problem with this […]

Well, the second most meaningless word after ‘terrorism’, of course, as Glenn Greenwald so expressively pointed out last year. Clearly, terrorism means nothing more than the violence your enemies commit. By construction, therefore, it never describes your own behavior, no matter how many innocent civilians you kill or under what circumstances, even if you kill […]

File this under the bat-shit crazy category of racism. Latma TV, the same fundamentalist right-wing media group (founded by luminaries such as the neuron-challenged Caroline Glick) that brought us the “We Con the World” parody after the flotilla massacre, now publishes a truly offensive skit mocking the Arab democracy revolutions. It would have been literally […]

I can appreciate that arguments for cultural boycott might require a little more intellectual sophistication and awareness than, say, being (verbally) against Jewish-only colonies on stolen land. Every self-identified Jewish or Israeli “liberal” loves to blame the settlers for everything (when they aren’t trying to blame Hamas), but the notion of boycotting cultural icons seems […]

Not only do Israelis hold intensely hypocritical attitudes toward Palestinian nonviolence, as I highlighted in my last post, but they also hold opinions about violent Palestinian resistance that are characterized by a kind of phony piousness. Israelis simply disallow Palestinians the same right to struggle for a national home that they afforded themselves. Here is […]

The massive, organized, hysterical opposition by Israelis and their lobbyists to the UN Security Council Resolution today, which aimed to condemn settlements (with Hillary Clinton’s own recent language about them) makes the whole game crystal clear. The real issue Israelis have is not that some Palestinian resistance fighters use violence (and often illegal, terrorizing violence […]

In an op-ed today, Aluf Benn argues that Israel cannot stop Palestinian independence except through the “terrible” options of bombing Iran, calling early elections (like this is equivalently “terrible”), or taking retaliatory action against the Palestinian Authority for daring to seek international support for a state. “Terrible” is the one adjective Benn manages to produce […]

Understanding nothing and learning nothing, FM Lieberman and his buddies stoke the fires of political violence with their fascist rhetoric designed to eliminate political opposition. FM Evet Lieberman: “It is the public’s right to know, these [Israeli human rights] organizations are terror supporters whose only goal is to weaken the IDF.” MK Ben-Ari: Leftist organizations […]

Not a particularly deep point, but it’s worth noting that Israeli incitement against Palestinians really is limitless. A couple days ago, initial reports suggested from the Israeli army that Palestinian militants had attacked soldiers, injuring at least four, but that it was unclear even hours after the event what had happened to “the terrorists”. Later […]